TG to Me by Maeryn Lamonte It's one year to the day since I published my first story on BCTS. By way of celebration, here's something a little different from my usual fare, also in response to one of the Melanie Ezell challenges (Who I am). So I went a little over the word limit on this one. Frankly my dears, I don't give a sh... hang on, that's not right... It is a bit of a disjointed ramble this, but I hope it sparks off a few ideas. Please remember in reading it that it is never my intention to be hurtful, and if there is anything in this offering that rubs raw, please accept my apologies and assurance that I never meant it that way.

When I was very young, I used to play dress up games with my brother. No harm in it, all perfectly innocent. Mum gave us a couple of her old dresses and we'd wander around the house pretending to be ladies. My brother would probably kill me if he knew I was telling you this, but then you see he grew out of it. I didn't.

I won't go into details, but sometime in my tweens I started cross dressing. I'm not sure I remember why I did it the first time, but I think it may have been because I was bored. The thing is, the moment I did, something seemed to click into place. It seemed right in an oddly wrong sort of way.

From that moment on I entered into the whole emotional caterpillar ride. Ups and downs, no understanding of where the whole thing was taking me, wanting, needing desperately, to indulge the girly side of me, then feeling hopelessly guilty and depressed about being a freak afterwards. And always somewhere in there, that doomed romantic's hope of change, of metamorphosis.

One of the harshest things I remember is having to deal with it on my own. It's not exactly something you can share easily, even within family. “Mum, I like to dress up in girls clothes” or “Mum I want to be a girl”. Not your typical conversation starters are they? That may be why I got caught, possibly because deep down under all the fear and guilt I wanted to be caught, wanted someone else to know, to help me figure out what I was doing and why.

It didn't work out that way though. There are aspects of life which many people don't want to be real. Death, debilitating illness, starving children in Africa, having a homosexual or transwhatevered person in the family. A great many deal with these issues by pretending that they don't exist, by counting on the really low probability that any such thing will affect them and ignoring that such things go on. The problem is, denial works most of the time. The bigger problem is when something that you are denying jumps out of the closet and goes boo, you are utterly unprepared to deal with it. So it was that the few times I was caught, I was confronted with a look of shock and horror and slugs and snails and what the hell are they doing wearing a dress? Then denial kicked in, the person in question backed out of the room and somehow the subject was never raised again.

Later in life, when my faith really caught fire, I fought with everything I had to deny this part of me. The Bible doesn't have a lot to say about the matter. Just one verse in Deuteronomy which seems pretty black and white and condemning, and I took it as such for a long while. Guilt piled in every time I gave into my demons (no I don't mean literal demons, though who knows...?) and I continued to struggle. I tried sharing my secret with a few friends. People I thought I could trust not to spread it about. People I thought I could count on to help me face this thing. None of them did very well with the latter, but they were at least kind enough to live up to my expectations for the former. Things didn't get better, but at least they didn't get worse.

Then there were the girlfriends. Not many, but a few, where the relationship got serious enough that desire not to keep secrets overcame fear of the response. Of all the girls I told, I never found one who understood, or was prepared to try. Not even my wife. I get the feeling that women feel threatened by men who have a girly side, at least the ones I tried to talk to about it did. It's like I was invading their territory. “Why don't you just go back to being a man leave the girling to us?“

And so they passed., bright moments of hope of finding someone with whom to share, but then the spark would die leaving me back in the dark. Struggling all the time to fit in with the people I loved who couldn't face the idea that I had this thing about me — this thing they didn't want to believe existed. Struggling not to give in to those ever growing desires. Struggling to deal with the guilt when I ultimately failed. One thing I learnt over and over about skirts and dresses: a moment on the hips, a lifetime full of guilt trips.

It might have gone on like that for all my life had things not turned completely sour. In the space of a very short time, I lost almost everything that mattered to me. What happened had nothing to do with my gender issues, but that didn't affect the outcome, I still hit rock bottom.

Clouds and silvery linings though. A bit tarnished in this case, but I did gain a few things from the whole crash and burn thing. First, it seemed that no matter how hard struggling with my gender confusion was, life had new and imaginative ways of becoming a whole lot worse. Second, when you hit the rocks so hard you end up digging into them, you realise that going down the rabbit hole is unlikely to make things significantly worse, so why the hell not? Third, I realised I had spare time to go with the inclination, and so set out on a voyage of exploration.

It wasn't that I chose then to come out into the open or anything like that. By that stage in my life, putting me in a dress would truly have been dressing mutton up as lamb. I cared too much for my family and friends to inflict that on them and the world. No my exploration was internal. Research, thought experiments, questions asked of myself and answered.

“So,” I asked myself, “do you want to be a woman? I mean if you could have the whole kit and caboodle, would you?”

“Hell yeah! Well... maybe. Actually, can I think about that?”

I did a pros and cons analysis:

Up side: Pretty clothes, jewellery, long hair, getting to look and smell attractive. Getting to be friends with lots of other women without feeling self-conscious. Not having to worry about whether girls you're not attracted to might get the wrong idea, or that girls you are attracted to might give you the brush you off. Did I mention pretty dresses? Not having to drink copious quantities of alcohol, or be interested in sports just to fit in. Childbirth and motherhood.

Down side: Periods, PMT, Menopause, loss of physical beauty to old age. Pains of childbirth, stinky nappies, looking after kids, cleaning and cooking, dealing with the arrogance and indifference of men. Glass ceiling, patriarchal attitudes in the workplace. Loss of physical strength, awareness of vulnerability.

I know there's some stereotyping in there and, short of miracles, magic or mad science, quite a few things I could never have in the real world. Even so, the lists about balanced out when matching how much each one would affect me. In the end I concluded that I would accept the change, if it were offered, if it were complete. The approximation that medical science can provide with hormones and surgery would never be enough for me. I began to realise I wasn't a woman in a man's body to use the buzz phrase of the transgendered. I suspected that I would have been happier as a woman, but I was pretty sure that even as a woman I would want a bit of guy time

“So is it the clothes then?” I asked the second question. Was this just a fetish?

“Well, I guess maybe, in a way. They're soft and comfortable and beautiful and erotic. They make me feel different. Like I can relax and be myself, like I can be softer inside too. They also get me aroused and when I allow that arousal to run its natural course, the old guilt train comes trundling along leaving me with a sense that I've abused the whole thing, sullied the femininity of the moment, tarnished its purity (if purity works here). So no, it's not just an erotic thing. What eroticism there is actually detracts from the main thing it gives me. It's like there's two of us inside here; a guy and a girl. It's like the girl wants to get out, and the clothes give her a way of feeling real, of expressing herself. She doesn't want to stay out for ever, but she does need to a place in this life too.”

But what does that mean?

What exactly is the difference between a man and a woman? Ok there's the obvious physical bit, but it goes deeper as well. I needed to dig down, to understand exactly what was the difference between Protestants and Catholics (old joke, you see there were these two kids playing together in a tree house. A girl from a Catholic family and a boy from a Protestant one. The girl persuades the boy that they should get undressed, and when she sees what's between his legs she says, “So that's the difference...”).

Before you read on, please accept that the following as largely speculation and generalisation. It doesn't apply to everyone, not now not back then. It's a thought experiment, a following of trails in the wilderness, where the tracks fade in places. There may be truth in where I go with it and there may not. It is intended to prompt thought rather than dictate the way things are, and I would be so interested to hear your thoughts.

I started with evolution — Ok I may be preaching to the choir here (ironical metaphor) but evolution, as Darwin described it, does work. There is variation within species which leads to adaptation. How and whether the theory can be extended to explain how one species changes into another is a bigger argument and one for another time. As a mechanism for change within a species though, evolution works.

Let's take a stroll back in time to a point in human (pre)history when the two sexes were considerably more alike. A time when we lived in the trees. A time when we adapted to have opposing thumbs for grasping branches, forward facing eyes for binocular vision and large brains for judging distances, angles and the amount of muscle necessary to jump from one branch to another. A time when the outward differences between male and female were hard to see, unless you knew where to look for them, and the inward ones were likewise small.

Then something happened. Climate change, new predators in the neighbourhood, whatever. Our ancestors were forced out of the trees to start a nomadic life in open country. Adaptation changed our feet so they were better at walking than holding branches, our bodies so that we could stand upright (probably above the long grass), our tails until they were almost non-existent, shrunken stubs, no longer tripping us up.

The new environment, without branches to jump between, left our brains with little or nothing to do, and they most likely reacted by generating hormones to give us that niggling feeling of boredom. To counter it, we started picking up rocks and sticks and soon found that they could be used as tools and weapons. Our brains found new outlets in construction, communication and creative cruelty and started to grow again.

The brain became a major factor in our species, not only helping us to survive, but flourish. There was a problem though. The brain got bigger, but the hole it came out of didn't. We had to adapt further. Specifically the females in our species had to adapt.

Babies did their bit by not fusing the plates of their skulls until after birth, so they could squish all that grey matter through a ten centimetre diameter hole. The change in the women was more dramatic. Broadening hips for (slightly) easier childbirth, loss of muscle-tone and increased suppleness — more stretchiness if you will. As the brain grew in size, women had to adapt by allowing themselves to become physically weaker and accepting times of extreme vulnerability in their lives. They also had to accept longer periods of dependence from their children as the bigger brain took longer to figure out what it was for.

This resulted in social evolution too. Women couldn't protect themselves so readily as individuals, so took to banding together, supporting one another in times of weakness and vulnerability and accepting the same support in their own turn. Collaboration became a far stronger survival trait for women than competition.

Men carried on with their simple competitive ways, scrapping to find out who was the biggest, strongest, fastest, most accurate, cleverest, etc, then putting together a pecking order to reflect this. To live as a man meant stomping on anyone beneath you who challenged your position, whilst at the same time trying to climb higher up the social ladder, avoid the the stomping feet above you as you went. With an established pecking order it was possible to work together for a common aims like building a camp or killing a mammoth, but in the end the general rule for living was still “look after number one and try to be top dog”, because when it came to women, top dog got to choose first.

Women found things less simple. Having discovered the need for interdependence, open competition was no longer an option, instead they adopted a far more passive role in courtship. They would make themselves as attractive as possible, use nature and their own ingenuity to enhance, not only their own beauty, but that of each other. In that way they would be able to avoid fighting each other, whilst at the same time enhancing the cooperation and interdependence they were nurturing within themselves. As the men made their choices, time and generations would ensure that their offspring would become more attractive. It would seem that each of them had an even chance (ok, some more even than others), so in the end those chosen by the best of the men would have done nothing overt to put themselves above the rest. If they did, jealousy and anger would drive them from the rest of the women's groups to survive or not on their own, so over time evolution would ensure that only those who played fair and worked together would survive. With the choice being totally (or nearly so) that of the men, each woman could argue that it wasn't her fault that she had been chosen, and the essential supportive bond that strengthened them as a group would survive.

It was s a weird solution, as is usually the case when the fix evolves rather than is designed, and it didn't always run smoothly. There were always those who bent the rules, played the system, but for the majority who accept the new order, it worked.

So there you have it. Mental and emotional differences between men and women, derived from a few random thoughts. There's a little genuine evidence in there, but a lot of half baked speculation. Some of it is right, most of it probably drifts off track somewhere along the line, but in an nutshell it gives some degree of explanation as a general rule:

Why men are competitive, aggressive, bold, take what they want and fight for it if need be. Why they establish a hierarchy of worth and keep on batting at each other to ensure the right guy is at the top. Why the constant competition leaves them with wary relationships with each other, which only slowly build in trust, and very rarely reach any level of completeness.

Why women are collaborative, supportive, passive. Look after each other, protect other each from predators, both animal and human, by banding together in groups. Why they work together for the welfare of all and the protection of everyone's children, each individual helping the others to be the best they can be and letting the men take the lead, make the decisions.

So why do men make the choices they do? Well they are largely visual creatures, so tend to be attracted to what looks good. And what does look good to a man, or a woman for that matter? A mixture of attributes:

Physical body — small, slender, soft skin, large eyes, full lips. All signs of classical beauty; all features which are prominent in young children. The physical adaptation of the female form to be more attractive to men was and is largely to do with delaying the onset of age. There are also the gentle curves of breasts, waist, hips, calves, all mirroring some of nature's own attempts at beauty.

Physical enhancements — Look around at the world. There are things in nature that are designed to be attractive. Beauty that draws the attention of others, both in and outside of a species. Flowers have their vibrant colours, delicate and intricate patterns, soft textures, tantalising fragrances. All intended to attract birds and insects. Butterflies have elaborate designs in their wings, birds with iridescent and multi-hued plumage. All the basis for the embellishment of clothing, jewellery, body paint, hair design.

Skills — For those not fortunate enough to possess physical beauty, even when enhanced, there are still those things a woman can do that are pleasing to men. Cooking, sewing, more recreational/intimate skills perhaps.

Thousands of years have passed, but the basic instincts still seem to be there. The tendencies are hard-wired into us now. We can see them in the difference in the structure of men's and women's brains. Women have more developed speech centres, a more natural instinct towards making themselves and their surroundings beautiful, a natural tendency to stick together, to protect themselves and their children. Men are generally more aggressive, more self reliant, more goal focused.

And how does the hard-wiring get in there? Like everything else, it starts off with the genes which dictate how much of which hormone will be made and when, how readily our brains, or even our bodies, take up the different hormones. There are many ways that genetic variation can affect the sexual development of an individual. Overlooking, for now, the ones that cause physical inter-sexing, there have been studies that show this at more subtle levels.

In 2008, a group of Australian doctors made a genetic study of one hundred and twelve male to female transsexual volunteers and discovered that a significant majority had a longer version of an androgen receptor gene which, they suggested, could cause weaker testosterone signals, resulting in the development of more female-like brain structures http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7689007.stm . This is only one of many possible genetic variations that could cause similar differences in development.

How much of each hormone is present, how much it affects either body or brain, and how much each different centre in the brain will develop varies considerably. It's not black and white, but rather shades of grey. Masculinity and femininity are not one thing or the other, but rather opposite ends of a spectrum, and every one of us lies somewhere along it's length. Each of us has some male and some female tendencies.

Generally speaking, a testosterone drenched male body will develop a predominantly male brain, just as an oestrogen imbued female body will develop a female one, but this doesn't happen in every case. The same tendency to variation which set us off on this route of change, keeps working and these genetic variations affect how the brain is built. Ok, most cases you get female brains in female bodies, and male brains in male bodies, but it's possible, highly probably even, that a physically male or female body can grow a brain structure that is more like that of the opposite gender, or even somewhere in between.

Where does this leave us? It's difficult to say. Society still prefers to stick with that which is familiar and will always be wary of the different. As long as transgendered issues remain hidden, the vast majority of people will continue in blissful ignorance of the struggles that go on around them.

I don't know where to go with this from here. I would like to talk about society existing in a dynamic equilibrium between those who wish to change it and expand it to include new experiences and expressions of the human condition, and those who want to keep it as it is. I would like to say that the equilibrium is necessary because not all new expressions are beneficial to individuals or society as a whole, but that the same can be said for a refusal of change. Stagnation can kill a society as readily as degeneration into wanton forms of self gratification. My reticence in talking about such things is that it seems that when I have drifted towards talking about similar things in the past, it as brought up automatic shields form some of my readers, and many of them have spikes on.

There is insufficient proof yet to show that TGism is wholly or even largely affected by genetics or hormone imbalance, but the evidence that it does in many cases should suggest that being TG isn't something that an individual can help. I know I never wanted to be like this, and the few people I've known along the same lines have expressed similar sentiments. It would be nice to think that, since this is the case, a place might be made in society for those such as us. After all other cultures around the world accept and even revere the twin spirited.

For those most affected, there may be no answer other than that offered by the surgeon's knife. I can't comment, having no personal experience along those lines, but that there are those on both sides of the gender divide who feel the need to make the crossing suggests no alternative for some people.

For those of us that sit somewhere in the middle though, I would like to find an alternative. What poor statistics exist regarding numbers of transgendered individuals do show a disparity between the number of men and women who claim to be affected. I may have said something similar, so shut me up if you've heard me talk about this before (heh), but I believe that the tendency for women to be more accepting of each other allows them to express themselves in a wider variety of ways. For twin spirited women, it seems it me that they can let the bloke in them out for a bit by being tomboyish. I believe the reason there are more men with transgendered issues is that there is less acceptable outlet for a man to be girly in any way.

Men tend to be very restrictive about what they wear. Fun is poked at the Scotsman in his kilt because it is more like a woman's skirt than any acceptable piece of male attire in our part of the world, and as for those Greek guard costumes (you know the ones with the white skirts and stockings and long flowing sleeves?)... Men like to keep thing the same to level the playing field. After all, what is a competition without rules, and what are rules if they're not restrictions to make sure everyone is playing the same game. In the man game, men want to be the aggressors and accepted for their prowess more than anything else. To wear something colourful and attractive would be playing against the rules.

People with TG brains want to interact with society as though they were members of the opposite sex. For the physical male, there is a part that wants to find companionship and support from other women, a desire to look pretty and take the passive role in relationships. This is too different from the accepted norm for most men, meaning they reject it out of hand, often violently. It is also disconcerting for most normal women who are used to responding to blokey blokes, and can't accept that a man — instinct says all he wants is to get her in bed and impregnate her — would want to enter their circle of friends simply for companionship.

For the physically female there is a desire to be 'just another one of the guys', which works great until you discover that the guys don't see it that way. When that particular disappointment hits, there is always the group of girls to go back to for comfort and support, but then that would require them giving up the sense of self-reliance that is part of their male brain.

For me personally, I'm a fence sitter. Not through choice, but through the way I am made. I can see both gardens from here, and the shade of green varies depending on which one I'm in. While I'm being a bloke, I'm neglecting the girly side of me. If I were to be a girl full time, I'd be neglecting the bloke in me. I need to be both at different times, and that would be true whether I had an inny or an outy (no not referring to belly buttons in this case). On the whole, I still think it would still be easier for me to get by as a girl, because I could indulge the bloke in me as a girl more readily than the other way round. That said, the approximation to the change that medical science can currently offer isn't enough for me. What is enough comes from the discoveries I've outlined above. They're a bit meandering and disjointed, but even so they help me to understand the way I am inside, and that has given me an answer I can work with... sort of.

Since I acknowledged the girl in me a year ago, I've been more content in my life. She plays in my imagination and tells me such wonderful tales, and it is enough for both of us, more or less. I would love to live in a more understanding, more accepting world where she could run barefoot across the park, skirt streaming behind her, with no disapproving looks to tell her she is unwelcome. Perhaps if enough stories are told to enough people and well enough, perhaps I may be fortunate and see the beginning of that change.

In the meantime, Happy Birthday Maeryn, I see you.